Saturday, 8 August 2015

SilentStalker has written the "Pilot" part of "So you want to build a WoT tech tree?" series.

Here it is:

Right, where to begin. As you already know, in 9.12 we’ll be getting the Czechoslovak tech tree. In this text series, I’ll be going over each vehicle of the tree, I will also give you notes and explain why this tank and no other was selected and the logic behind some of the decisions I proposed and Wargaming took. This first part will be long, the rest will be considerably shorter. You've been warned.

How it all began

Actually, it began in January 2012 with my first proposal for a "branch" in the Czech section. It was of course complete crap (fake tanks, T-54 on tier 9 etc. - back then there were no tier 10 medium tanks!). I wasn't really serious about it but Tuccy (current World of Warships community manager - I think, maybe he's a producer now, I don't know) caught up on that and made his own proposal in March 2012. He said he passed these proposals to Minsk but later on I found the developers in Minsk never even heard of it and so this went nowhere. But it caught my attention, I started writing about the tanks, then came FTR... you know the rest.

what do you do when you have the most overpowered pay to win premium tank in the game with 65 percent average winrate that you sell in 100 EUR bundles? That's right... you buff it even more!

Old armor:

New armor:

What changed?

- Side 40mm weakspots removed, now the entire side is 50mm;
- Commander cupola is now tiny, very hard to hit;
- Frontal 70mm "weakspots" (if you can call it that way) removed, now the entire front is 80mm;
- Rear now has two 60mm zones in addition to the old 50mm armor.

- Effective LFP was buffed from 140mm to 150mm;- Effective UFP was nerfed from 120/130 to 115/130 (but the 85mm hatches weakspots were removed);
- The turret is a bit smaller and the armor is roughly the same;
- Commander cupola became smaller but its armor was nerfed from 140mm to 95mm.

- Czechoslovakia will come in 9.12 along with Czechoslovak-themed map (by the end of the year);- Czechoslovak T 40 will come in 9.11;- Some more premium tanks will be removed from sales;- One more nation will appear in 2016 (RG: Sweden);- It's too early to speak about PvE mode in WoT, WG is testing different variants;- Japanese have so few premium tanks because they didn't produce that many tanks to begin with;- More premium tanks will be added in the future but not so many as in this year;- Clan chat might be added to WoT Assistant but the idea requires research;- WG is working on Dx11/Dx12 support and multicore support but at this moment no exact ETA is known;- It's possible that new crew skills and perks will appear, WG considered a whole scale of solutions including total skill overhaul but the final decision was not taken yet;- New vehicle classes will not appear in WoT;- Multiturret and multigun mechanisms for WoT were completely scrapped;- Developers are considering adding smoke grenades (shells) to WoT but this requires a lot of further development;- It's possible Japanese and Chinese TD's will appear in the game but not anytime soon;- Developers are working on HAVOK but given the issues with performance there is no ETA yet.